


"Stowaway" - statement of Rook Galloway regarding an encounter with Grifter's Bone

by aunt_zelda



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kidnapping, Licking, Mind Control, Music, Non-Consensual Touching, Stabbing, Threats of Violence, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:26:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24557632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aunt_zelda/pseuds/aunt_zelda
Summary: Jon takes a statement from someone who encountered a very strange band, whose lead singer wore too many belts, and whose music spurred the crowd to intense violence.Meant to take place sometime in the later half of S3.
Comments: 42
Kudos: 207
Collections: Mechanisms and Magnus Crossovers that maintain the integrity of mechanisms lore





	"Stowaway" - statement of Rook Galloway regarding an encounter with Grifter's Bone

**Author's Note:**

> Dove hard into the Mechanisms this past week and I couldn't be happier. 
> 
> Got to thinking about Grifter's Bone, and the crossovers I've seen people do already with that and the Magnus Archives. Also that line on their website about someone who filled in on the band once, and that really stuck out to me as having potential for a spooky story. 
> 
> Italicized lines are from the Tales to be Told song, which belongs to the Mechanisms.

“Name?”

“Rook. Rook Galloway.”

Jon eyes the visitor dubiously. 

“It’s my name. They/them, by the way. Not that you asked.” Rook glares, but it looks like they’re clinging to familiar anger as a defense against the fear they’re feeling deep down. Melanie was like that when she gave her statements. 

Jon shrugs. People have given fake names before, and on the off chance this is a real name one of the others can find that out easily enough. “Statement of Rook Galloway … regarding?”

“Uh,” Rook looks pained. “Playing with Grifter’s Bone.”

Jon sits up straighter. 

The story that unfolds is as bizarre as any recorded statement. Rook was at dive bar looking to hear some strange music. (Jon recognizes the name of the place, a real shithole he and Georgie once saw some truly terrible punk bands at when they were in uni and challenged each other to find the worst of the worst.) Rook was alone, so there are no friends to corroborate of course. They were a little drunk by their own admission, but not high that night because they were among strangers. The first band had been bollocks, the second hardly better, and then the third … had been Grifter’s Bone. 

“At first I didn’t realize who they were, it was just a band setting up. When they announced their name there was static interference and it was all garbled. But something felt … wrong. In the air. Like you know the way it feels before a thunderstorm, that crackling in the air, the way it smells? It was that but … more.” Rook looks desperately at Jon. 

Jon nods encouragingly. He knows something of that unsettling wrongness that can infect a space when one of the Fears is present. 

“One of them got on the main microphone. Weird looking guy, he had eyeliner smeared all over his face and way too many belts. I thought it was another crap steampunk thing, y’know, ‘pip pip, let’s glue gears to our hats and ignore colonialism?’ He asked if anyone wanted to join, ‘cause they were down a member that night. I’d had a few pints, so I … no, it wasn’t the pints. I felt … compelled, to do it. I raised my hand. And he sniffed the air and then he _looked_ right at me.” Rook shudders. 

Jon thinks of how the Hunt’s Avatars sense their targets, the way Trevor and Julia talked of running him down. He doesn’t shiver, but only just. 

“Like, right through my soul? Into my soul? It was terrifying. He waved me up, called me their ‘latest stowaway’ and the band hustled me into position. I’d never heard the music before but it didn’t matter, once there was an instrument in my hand I just … knew. I knew what to play. All the notes. I haven’t even touched a recorder since I was a kid, certainly never a violin but … I played. And it was good.” Rook has tears in their eyes now. “It was so good. It was beautiful. Transcendental.” They stare down at their hands.

“And the crowd?” Jon asks, when the silence drags on. “The urban legends all say that Grifter’s Bone can have a very violent impact on a crowd.”

“Yes.” Rook nods, still staring down at their hands. “Yes, that’s all true. We were playing, up on the stage. And the crowd was loving it. They were going wild, dancing, moshing, and then the moshing started to get out of control. It was a small space and that many people shoving and pushing can go bad fast. Worse, a shitty place like that didn’t have proper bouncers. I heard someone scream, then a lot of people were screaming, but we were singing so loudly I’m not sure when that began, maybe between the weird Arthurian-Western fusion and the power-metal-Norse fusion?”

Jon really wants to ask about that, but doesn’t want to stop Rook. 

“I looked out at the crowd and I saw a woman tearing her hair out. I saw someone smash a bottle over their friend’s head. Some bloke took out a knife and started stabbing the nearest person, over and over again, to the beat of the tempo. I tried to stop singing, someone had to stop it, to call the police, I had to get the hell out of there but … I couldn’t stop playing. My fingers started bleeding, see?” Rook holds up their hand and Jon sees the bandages. 

“I … see.” Jon holds back sharing the knowledge that bleeding fingers are quite normal for someone inexperienced with the violin, who haven’t developed the appropriate calluses. He’s not entirely sure how he knows that himself. Did he know someone in school who played the violin?

“So we finished the set. There was a song about … drunken pirates? Sailors? I stared out over the carnage, all the bodies. I’d been out there just an hour before and … everyone was dead. The bartender was dead, he had a corkscrew through the eye. This asshole who’d shoved me in the line was dead, sliced to ribbons. A girl I was going to give my number to was the last one standing, she had two knives in her hands and a dozen wounds, when the final chord sounded she collapsed.” Rook shakes their head. “There was so much blood … I could practically taste it.” 

Jon feels like he can taste it too. 

“The band was so happy. They told me I did well. The second violinist slapped me on the back. I tried to say something, ask them why, why they’d chosen me, why they’d done this … but I’d sung myself hoarse.” Rook wipes at their eyes. 

Jon gives Rook a moment. “And after that?”

“I passed out. All the energy just, got sapped from me. I woke up in an alley behind the bar. I went to check, I opened the door and looked in and … the next thing I knew I was vomiting. I got out of there. I didn’t want to be caught near any of that.” Rook’s hands are shaking. 

Jon gets up and opens his office door. “Martin, can you go make our visitor some tea … Martin?”

Martin should be just outside, but he’s not. Neither is Tim. One of the landline desk phones is dangling off the receiver, crackling. Jon goes over to it and picks it up. 

“Martin, are you still there? Don’t worry about Jon, just lock yourself in a supply closet and for god’s sake, _cover your ears_!” it’s Elias. He actually sounds concerned. 

Jon sets the phone down and strains to hear down the hallway. 

_“… book is lying open … there are tales to be told …”_

There’s a stomping of boots and … harmonica music?

Jon goes back to his office and shuts the door. 

_”… mind your manners, sonny Jim, we’ve seen beyond the stars!”_

Rook is pale and visibly sweating. “They’re here!” they gasp. “You have to help me! Hide me!” They scramble under the desk. 

_”… We know the void is screaming mad! No happy endings out there, lad!_

“They’re … Grifter’s Bone is here?” Jon turns to the door, wondering if he can shift the bookcase in front of it. 

_"The book is lying open! There are tales to be told!”_

The door bursts open, smashed off its hinges. 

On the threshold stands an array of very strange people. Well, Jon thinks “people” but looking directly at them hurts his eyes. He’s reminded of some of the Stranger’s creatures, patchwork people and mannequins. At least one of them looks exactly like a mannequin in a soldier’s uniform, a painted mustache and a stiff grin that doesn’t move. There’s a figure who shines metallic, and another whose eyes glint like lasers. Near the back Jon would swear he sees one with _wings_. At the very front is person with truly unfortunate facial hair and very strange eye markings, like cracking porcelain. He’s brandishing a pistol and a harmonica. 

“There’s our little stowaway!” cries the one with the eye marks. He levels the pistol at Rook. It looks antique and futuristic all at once, and it hurts Jon to Look directly at it. “Gotcha in our sights now!”

Rook wails. “Leave me alone, please!” 

“Nonsense. You haven’t got a choice: we’re shanghaiing you!” The one with the pistol gestures to the rest of the group. “We’ve got a show to play a long way from here and you’ll do nicely as our backup.”

“We Need Backup!” the mannequin looking one says. “You Are A Skilled Violinist!” 

“You could be better,” says one with what Jon very much hopes is merely a prosthetic arm, and not some Stranger grafting job. 

“Don’t worry, he’s just jealous,” the one with wings nudges the man with the arm. “Marius, go easy on them.”

“Yes, Marius, go easy on them.” the one with the gun gestures theatrically. 

Marius pushes the desk over like it weighs nothing, and reaches down to haul Rook up by their arm. “You’re no Nastya, but you’ll do for now.”

“ **Let. Them. Go.** ” Jon pushes the words out and feels the pulse of the Eye on his tongue. 

Marius drops Rook, who tries to hide behind the fallen desk. 

The band turns and focuses suddenly on Jon. Nostrils flare. Hands twitch to weapons. They have quite a lot of weapons. 

The leader – if there is a leader, they’re so chaotic, he just seems the loudest of the lot – acts first. He lunges forward far faster than a human ought to be able to move, knocks his gun against Jon’s head and sends him sprawling against the bookcase. 

“ **St –!** ” Jon gasps, trying to focus and compel the band to leave. 

“Careful!” the man swings around and seizes Jon by the throat. His fingers are strong, frighteningly strong. He pins Jon to the wall and tightens his grip. 

Jon wheezes, fingers scrambling feebly at the man’s arm. 

“None of that. It would be such a waste to crush that pretty throat of yours,” the man growls. “From the little I heard I bet you could do a mean invocation yourself. Man after my own, heh, _heart_.”

“Take him!” Rook pleads from the floor. “Take him, he’s got a great voice!”

“Mmmm, tempting,” the man muses, lifting Jon off the floor briefly. “You’ve been marked though, boy. You reek of it. Taking you would cause us nothing but trouble, and not the fun kind of trouble.” He licks Jon’s cheek and draws back with dramatic disgust. “God, the Mother of Puppets has her ties deep in you, hasn’t she? And all the rest!” he spits on the floor. “We don’t need to get involved in some kind of custody battle.” 

Abruptly he lets Jon go. Jon crumbles at the man’s feet, gasping for breath. 

“Come along, little stowaway,” the man says, grabbing Rook by the collar and dragging them out of the room. “If you play well enough, we might not shoot you!”

Jon’s last sight of them is the sweep of brown coats and Rook’s desperately scrabbling shoes on the floor. Then … they’re gone. 

Jon heaves himself back up to his desk. He fumbles for the recorder, somehow untouched in the fray, and glares at its still-whirring tape. “End recording.” 

Martin, it turns out, was hiding in a supply closet after getting manhandled in by Tim after the ominous warning call from Elias. There’s no sign of Grifter’s Bone or Rook, any of them, no matter how hard the team searches. Tim digs up a few tweets about lights and a strange object sighted in the sky around the time of the performance and after the abduction in the Institute, but that’s all. The police, as always, cover up the massacre in the dive bar, blaming it on a gas leak and poor safety inspections. 

Elias refuses to acknowledge his dismissal of Jon’s safety on the call, claiming Jon was hearing things and should have his ears checked. Jon does get his ears checked. He receives a stern warning from the doctor to “stop going to so many loud music performances” for that. 

The twang of guitars and the scent of whiskey and gasoline lingers in the air at the Institute for the next week.


End file.
